Last night was my second night of playing through the new seasonal content in Destiny 2, and immediately it feels like there are a lot of comparisons between this and the Season of Opulence. In that season it introduced the concept of the Chalice, which is a quest item that you effectively unlock various functions of over the course of the season. Additionally there is a runes mini-game that allows you to forge specific weapons in a new game mode called The Menagerie. This mode sent you into the Leviathan where you participated in a randomized sequence of encounters, the number of which you have to do depends on just how successful you are at each of them. The runes slotted into the Chalice dictated what sort of rewards you were able to get in this game mode.
For those who are playing this season, that is going to seem really familiar because the Obelisks that we unlock around the locations are more or less serving the same role as the Chalice, giving us something to keep unlocking as the season goes forward. The improvement this time around is that they jettisoned the runes mini-game and instead simply allow us to choose a specific weapon upon each completion of the Sundial event. Which weapons you get to choose from are determined by which Obelisk you have linked the Sundial event to. I’ve been running with the Tangled Shore event linked in an attempt to get really good Auto Rifle rolls. In theory at some point I will swap over to Mars where I can get a Grenade Launcher or a Linear Fusion Rifle. Next week we apparently get a new set of destinations and with it brand new weapons to try for.
In my journey to get a god roll on the Steelfeather Repeater, I think I may have just gotten one. This weapon is amazing, and is rapidly becoming my favorite Auto Rifle. The roll that I managed to pull is Multi-Kill Clip, Feeding Frenzy, Ricochet Rounds and Hammer-Forged Rifling. Feeding Frenzy and Multi-Kill Clip work so well together on this weapon with Multi-Kill Clip giving you a buff for killing multiple targets with this weapon before reloading and Feeding Frenzy making that reload after a kill way faster. The cadence that you can fall into this weapon feels so good and the sound and speed… just makes you feel like you are wrecking everything in sight.
Another interesting weapon that I picked up last night is this curated masterwork roll of Last Man Standing. I took down an invading Guardian in Gambit Prime and saw this drop into my inventory. I like the gun an awful lot, but the biggest problem that I have with it… is the magazine size. I still use my Ikelos shotgun almost entirely because of the fact that it has 8 rounds in the magazine. Were this a different element… then it might have gotten some play. The biggest thing this weapon has going for it is auto loading holster, allowing me to swap over to a primary and have this reloaded when I need it again.
The absolute BEST part of this season however are the changes made to Escalation Protocol. You can now get relevant armor each time you take down the wave 7 boss without having to go through the key upgrade minigame. As a result folks are playing this game mode again and this morning when I dropped onto Mars to check that Obelisk I happened to random into a successful Wave 7 kill. That is something that used to happen back when Escalation Protocol was active content, but has not happened for a very long time. Now however… I am super pumped to have this back in the rotation of things that I can do. I hope to finally get the weapons I am missing as a result.
All in all I am pretty excited for this season and the way they are tweaking things to revitalize older content. Destiny really is in and excellent state, and I think Bungie as a whole has a pretty firm grasp on how to make this game successful.
Yesterday was the opening of a brand new season in Destiny 2 and with it comes a new batch of events to participate in and quests to complete. Thankfully it seems that if you failed to complete any of the “Ritual” weapons from last season they are still in your quest log and seemingly something you can continue to chew on. I am SUPER thankful about this because I have done a relatively poor job at keeping up with these, and as a result I have a massive backlog of things to work on over time. Gone is the Vex Incursion and here to replace it is the Sundial, which involves us attempting to fight back waves of Cabal culminating in a battle with a super powered Psion.
Similar to last season, if you have the seasons pass you get a full set of the armor and an exotic scout rifle called the Symmetry. Taking this to Banshee unlocks the catalyst quest, and for someone who generally does not like scout rifles at all this is a pretty solid weapon. It is fairly fast firing for a Scout Rifle and packs a surprising punch, but I have not really spent much time doing content with it. I have to admit I was a little uncertain of what this season would feel like since the last season dropped at the same time as a whole bunch of expansion content. However as a result it feels like Bungie made this event way more intricate to make up for the fact that we are not also spending a lot of time doing Shadowkeep content at the same time.
Attached to the Sundial is powering up pylons that appear on different destinations. The first of these is on the Tangled Shore and involves doing content there to gain energy, when you then bank into the pylon. Once the pylon has been unlocked you can spend a currency called Fractaline that you get from doing bounties and completing main quest steps in order to further power up the pylon. Each rank seems to unlock new weapons that you can attempt to “forge” of sorts by completing a bounty effectively phasing them into reality. I completed several of these last night trying to get better rolls of the new Auto Rifle called Steelfeather Repeater which is a fast rate of fire weapon that just sounds and feels awesome to use.
Another weapon that I got from the first pylon was Breachlight, which is a truly badass looking sidearm. Normally speaking I don’t really like sidearms, but this is of the pulse variety firing I believe 3 rounds per burst. I can’t say that my particular roll was amazing, but it is not horrible. The main reason why I am getting used to this is that one of the new ritual weapons this season is also a sidearm and requires you to get a bunch of kills in strikes using that weapon class. I like that they are mixing things up each season and trying to get us playing with different weapon types.
Once again there are two weapons unlocked by leveling your way through the seasons journey. For Undying it was an Auto Rifle and a Heavy Machinegun… both weapons that are thoroughly in my wheelhouse. This time around the first one unlocked is a thoroughly mediocre rocket launcher. Ultimately for me there are three perks I care about on Rocket Launchers… Tracking, Cluster Bombs and Proximity Detonation. This has none of those and as a result is not likely ever going to replace my baby Gjallarhorn which has Tracking and Clusterbombs on it.
Another weapon that is absolutely not generally in my wheelhouse is the sniper rifle. I never use them. Like in Destiny 1 I used to use them during burn phases, but it always feels like there is never enough ammunition available to make them worthwhile. The Trophy Hunter unlocks later in the seasons journey and is extremely high impact and long range… which could be useful for using it to break void shields thanks to the Genesis perk giving you back ammunition. It also has Dragonfly which might be useful if you slot in a Dragonfly mod… which reminds me that I really need to spend more time forging weapons so that I can buy more Black Armory mods. I am not exactly excited to have this weapon but that is only because I am not a sniper person.
The weapon I am the most excited about… I think is going to be tied to the Recovering the Past quest line. I loved Saint-14s shotgun from the Curse of Osiris expansion, and I am hoping that we get an exotic version of this through the questline, or at least a better modern legendary version. I feel like I barely had time to scratch the surface of the new content and there are already enough switches to flip to keep me happy for a bit. I am only rank 2 for the season, so over the next few weeks I will be working on grinding out Rank 100 again to unlock everything. I really like the direction they are going with this game and since I am effectively done with Season 19 in Diablo 3, I am ready to go here again.
Kenzie.exe is hibernating
This morning is one of those mornings when I am not exactly sure what to write about, so as a result I figured I would give an update on Kenzie. Some weeks back in a stress filled post I talked about her being diagnosed with diabetes. In the time since then we have begun an insulin regiment in the morning and evening and are going back for another round of tests on Friday morning. The good news is that the insulin has seemingly halted the weight loss, and she may have gained some back but I am not sure if I am imagining that or not. The bad news is that due to some miscommunications the Vet was not able to successfully complete a glucose curve last week and we have to reattempt it this Friday.
A very tiny shoulder mounted Kenzie
Another positive however is that because she has been with me since a kitten, she pretty much will tolerate me doing anything that needs to happen. That is not to say that she does not protest furiously when I do have to poke her with a needle, but she more or less forgives me immediately. I am so thankful that if I were to have any cat come down with this disease… that it is Kenzie, because there is no way in hell that I could have given twice a day shots to Mollie. I can barely even pick her up without her freaking the hell out. Kenzie on the other hand I can carry around on my shoulder indefinitely because I have done so since she was super tiny. Above is photo evidence of this era when she would sit on my shoulder and watch me game.
While not super evident by the fact that I am only level 50… I have been spending a lot of time playing Diablo III on the Switch. This has recently replaced Dragalia Lost as my before sleep game that I am playing while laying down in bed. Last night I was not feeling super great and wound up going to bed around 9 pm and then hanging out and playing D3 until the news came on. I am mostly spending my time going through bounties, and I doubt that I will complete the seasons journey on console… but it does give me something to work towards. Seeing how freaking brutal Kolrath was I opted to play as a Barbarian, and I like the female Barb way better than the male one.
Another thing that has been going on recently is that I have been playing a lot of Minecraft. I opted to start in creative mode and started piddling around on a giant castle project. I started work on this as some point during Saturday and this is around the time of recording the podcast Saturday night. You can see that I started putting up a giant wall but hadn’t made much progress in actually hollowing anything out. I find the whole process relaxing as hell and lately I have been in this weird funk of not really knowing what to play. I could be finishing up Outer Worlds and I could also be finishing up Jedi Fallen Order, but instead I have spent my time building a castle.
This screenshot is from this morning and hopefully shows off some of the scale of this monstrosity. Inside there are four levels worth of construction, and the “ground floor” enters into what is effectively the 3rd floor going up, with two floors below the ground. I am not entirely certain what I am going to do with the 1st and 2nd floor as of yet, but I think the next big project is to build essentially a “keep” on top of the peak that you can see on the right side of the walled city area.
Since I have been building on creative mode, I have not been super concerned with torching things off and as a result I have a basement full of monsters that have spawned in. This is the second floor or Basement 1 depending on how you think about it, and I need to sort out what I have planned for down here. My general idea was that the ground floor would be shops and this floor would be small houses/apartments and maybe the same for the lowest floor, but ritzier houses since everything floats out over a giant underground lake of sorts. I want to build some other buildings out along the countryside as well, because there would be an assemblage of housing NEAR the walled city but not quite in it as well. Maybe build up a walled farm or two that are protected to feed resources into the city.
I am back playing the Java version of Minecraft because for a bit I kicked around starting a server in my home for this map. I also really miss the minimap addon whenever I am playing on the Windows 10 client. Ultimately this is sorta what I do when I am playing the game. I invent civilizations and build the structures that they would have used. The funny thing is… once the process is over I do absolutely nothing with the end product and often times just discard the maps after having spent hundreds of hours working on them. All that ultimately remains is a series of screenshots to prove that I did the thing.
Rift
On Friday I started a new series where I talk about the games from the last decade that specifically had an effect on me. The original plan was to do a bunch of single posts, but after some back and forth I decided upon the format of posting games from a specific year. One of the interesting things about this journey is that I am realizing just how fallible my memory is. There is no way I would have ever said that Rift, Skyrim and SWTOR all came out in the same year… but I would have been very wrong. This was seemingly a year of significant changes.
Rift
Rift released in March of 2011 and on paper appeared to be everything that I had ever wanted in an MMORPG. It was an game with a techno-fantasy setting that allowed me to multi-class builds until my heart was content. More importantly it gave me the ability to have a tank with Charge AND Death Grip! I cannot underscore how important that last bit was to my early enjoyment of this game. I rolled a Bahmi Warrior which placed me on the side of the Defiant, aka the Red Team. The central conflict in World of Warcraft was often presented in terms of Good vs Evil, and your definition of that depended greatly upon the side of the fence you started on. Rift on the other hand focused on a debate between Religion and Technology, with me firmly throwing in on the side of technology.
Rift released at a time when it felt like Blizzard was not listening to the players, and in contrast the fledgling Trion Worlds was constantly engaging with the community greatly increasing the appeal. I changed my own religion at the time of being a World of Warcraft site to being all in on Rift, heralding it as the WoW Killer and true savior of MMORPG gaming. I can’t say for certain why I wandered away from the game, but I think in part it was due to the fact that a large chunk of my gaming circle didn’t quite set down the roots that I did. Without a viable raid, we were limited to doing the hardest version of the Rifts, which got old pretty quickly. The release of another game on this list ultimately signaled the closing of my renaissance with the game. It however has been something that I have returned to time and time again and while I am not actively playing it at the moment, remains an extremely important part of my gaming history.
Rage
Every so often a game is released that I absolutely love… and that apparently no one else did. One of those games was Rage, released by ID software in October. What it promised on paper was Doom meets Fallout… and what it delivered was something that felt like it had all of the potential in the world but never quite delivered on any of it. Rage was one of those games that I finished during act one, and I fully expected to open up a wider world… but instead got a credits roll. The few moments before the credit roll however were extremely compelling game play and presented a really interesting world, that I spent entirely too little time in. The follow up this past year took the wrong queues from how to make a sequel and I largely bounced off of it.
I think Rage would have done well, were it not for the horrific technical issues that I remember at the time. ID Software in the post Quake world is often times more of a game engine company than a game developer themselves, and in some ways Rage felt more like a tech demo than anything fully fleshed out. It was the first game to release on the Id Tech 5 engine, and reportedly at launch was a buggy mess. I remember it being a bit of a beast when it came to requirements, but I also managed to play it fairly successfully on the PC. I remember this game being poorly reviewed… but looking back it managed to get a 79 on meta critic… though maybe at the time we didn’t view that as a positive score. I replayed through this game a few years back and it still more or less holds up well.
The Elder Scrolls V – Skyrim
My first foray into the world of the Elder Scrolls was with Daggerfall, and I played through it well after that game was gone from its prime. The first Elder Scrolls game that reeled me in with the genres possibility was Morrowind, and when Oblivion released I was completely hooked. By the time Skyrim was announced and ultimately released I was a ravening fanboy ready to consume more of this giant open world setting, and the game delivered on every possible dimension. It would be impossible to create a greatest games of the last decade list without Skyrim on it, especially now that it is pretty much available for every conceivable platform.
What I love about Skyrim is how I am able to just roam aimlessly through the world deciding my own path at all times. The game doesn’t rush me to make any decisions and allows me to carve my own path through the world. I remember on my first playing I went about 15 levels without ever finding the stones that allow you to effectively choose what sort of “class” you were going to play. In fact I pretty much went the opposite direction and it was a significant time before I finally made it to town. As soon as the shackles of the intro quest were removed… I was off doing my own thing figuring out my place in the world. It is for this reason that the game seems to have infinite replay-ability for me personally. Most of the times I pick it up I don’t get even vaguely close to finishing it, but it gives me a fun escape when I need it most.
Star Wars the Old Republic
I have such mixed feelings about Star Wars the Old Republic. On one hand it is one of the best roleplaying games to ever exist with some of the most interesting story content I have ever played through. On the other hand, it is a clone of a very specific era of World of Warcraft and by the time the game released felt somewhat dated and awkward. This would have made a very worthy sequel to the Knights of the Old Republic franchise, if they would have taken a single path and expanded upon it. However what you have is some of the best story-lines that Bioware has ever created trapped inside the husk of a very traditional MMORPG.
This era is also somewhat tainted by the fact that it was a grand experiment in guild building as I attempted to make lots of disparate groups of people mesh together, a problem that I consistently find myself in. This experiment however didn’t go so smoothly and saw the guild fracturing into two factions. In later years the game redeemed itself as the sort of expression of pure joy that I seem to find myself returning to anytime there is a Star Wars movie on the horizon. The more single player focus allows you to churn through the story and feel powerful doing so, more or less allowing you to skip over the bumpy bits. The Fallen Empire and Knights of the Eternal Throne campaigns represent some of the best RPG goodness I have experienced in a long while. I would at a bare minimum suggest working your way through the original story-line on every single class, because there is interesting overlap and interplay between them. It was and continues to be a pretty phenomenal game-play experience, once you get past a few of the rough spots.
Where Bel Was Mentally in 2011
I felt extremely off balance, having left a game I had been playing for the better part of several years and trying to find a new home. House Stalwart had been that home and as I ventured forth into post WoW territory I found a bunch of temporary housing but it really did take me a long time until I settled into a new family. It also begins the era I am in currently of never quite being able to fully commit to any game. I was super prolific when I was into Rift… and then not at all as I started to pull away from that game. During April I had 24 posts… and by the time you get to November I was down to a single post for that entire month. I found myself actively avoiding the concept of raiding, having effectively just had a “bad breakup” with World of Warcraft and raiding in that game.
So where were you in 2011? What were the games that you found important during that year? Drop me a comment below and let me know what I missed that really mattered to you personally.
